Question: Best pre-processing for multi-camera-project ?

[Christoph Puetz]

Dear PI users,

we plan to take some photos of the same object with several DSLR Cameras in parallel in order to reach high
integration times. Optics differ not much, but they can (i.e. focal lenght 900-1000mm), also resolution the the DSLRs (about 12Mpix, Canon).
Each camera will take all necessary Dark-/bias-/Flatframes and each single lightframe will be calibrated as usual.
The question is :

Is it better to collect all calibrated lightframes of all cameras, align them, and integrate them in one step
or
should each camera calibrate and integrate the lightframes separately ?
Using the second way, all integrated camera-specific integrated frames must be aligned and "averaged" in a third step to give
the final result.

What we don't know - which way is better or will give the better integrated results ?

Thanks for your advices,
Christoph

[Philip de Louraille]

1) Every instrument is unique. Hence each camera (I see no telescope mentioned?) set of master frames is unique.
Once all of the data has been calibrated per its capturing instrument, then,
2) you could integrate all of them together (that really ought to eliminate random variations),
3) or you could stack each set independently and then stack the resulting results

It would be interesting to see the differences between 2) and 3)

[Alejandro Tombolini]

Hi

I would integrate all together in one step, using "noise evaluation" in Weights

Saludos.
Alejandro.